By It’s crunch time. You’ve got an upcoming launch — a big piece of content, new research whitepaper, a brand new feature, product, or service — and you need to earn the attention of the right audience. The obvious channels: your own email list, social accounts, and blog will only get you so far. You need help. You need amplification. You need coverage.
Your marketing tactics will vary. For some types of launches, it’s enough to drop an email, a Twitter, Linked, or Instagram DM. For others, you’ll need to involve potential amplifiers early, make them fans first, and then ask for their help in blowing the horn. But as Ross Simmonds wisely says, “Distribution is Key” (side note, if you’re launching anything, I really like his template for content distribution). Whatever your tactics, that outreach list is key.
Example of an Outreach Target Launch List in SparkToro
Discovering the sources of influence that reach your audience — the publications, journalists, podcasts, websites, YouTube channels, social accounts, etc — is a painstaking process. Weeks or months of surveys, interviews, social account cyberstalking… No wait; scratch that. It WAS a painstaking process. Not anymore.
The video below shows how, in under 10 minutes, you can find those critical sources for outreach, the ones that are most likely to care about your launch because it impacts their audience.
I’m using Scott Heimendinger’s request on Twitter as an example. Scott wants to reach an audience likely to be interested in cooking with a steam oven, so I spent a few minutes building him an outreach list in SparkToro. No process or tool is perfect, but you can clearly see how fast and powerful the tool is for identifying sources of influence that fit the criteria and reach the product’s ideal audience.
Via @SeattleFoodGeek on Twitter
Hopefully, next time you’ve got something to launch, you’ll try this process. Even with a free account, you can run up to 10 searches a month and uncover high-potential amplifiers to reach customers who’ll care about what you’ve built.
p.s. If you need any help formatting queries or using the tool’s features, don’t hesitate to drop me a line: rand at sparktoro.com or a tweet: @randfish.